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Michael Cadwell Book Signing

Public Programs

Strange Details cover art

Michael Cadwell Book Signing

Fri, Nov 30, 2007 5:30 PM

"In the course of his brief book, Mr. Cadwell provides admirably focused, legible, and sympathetic readings of the similar accomplishment of four very different structures, each in its way a milestone of mid-century modernist architecture."--New York Sun

Michael Cadwell is a practicing architect and Associate Professor in the Austin E. Knowlton School of Architecture at The Ohio State University. A former Fellow of the American Academy in Rome and the MacDowell Colony, he is the author of Strange Details, the new book he will be signing in our bookshop.

About Strange Details

Confronted with the intricate construction details of Italian architect Carlo Scarpa's Querini Stampalia Gallery--steel joined at odd intervals, concrete spilled out of concatenated forms, stone cut in labyrinthine patterns--Michael Cadwell abandoned his attempts to categorize them theoretically and resolved instead to appreciate their idiosyncrasies and evoke their all-embracing effects. What he had dismissed as a collection of fetishes he came to understand as a coherently constructed world that was nonetheless persistently strange. In Strange Details, Cadwell looks at the work of four canonical architects who "made strange" with the most resistant aspect of architecture--construction. In buildings that were pivotal in their careers, Scarpa, Frank Lloyd Wright, Mies van der Rohe, and Louis Kahn all created details that undercut our critical and analytical terra firma.